Oral Storytelling Web

When the eloquent voice and gesture of some grey wrinkled old man…

In these distant islands [the Hebrides], where men live slowly, and live long, probably because they do not live fast, –in queer rude hovels built of turf and boulders, where men of fourscore years have spent the most of their quiet lives, –in these quiet still pools in the current of life, old thoughts accumulate like gold-dust in a Sutherland burn, and there they are preserved.

There on winter nights children, with wondering eyes and mouths agape, sit in the ruddy light of the peat-fire, under the grey canopy of smoke, and listen breathless to these weird old myths. They cease to be ragged, bare-legged lads and lasses, with shock heads of dark or flaxen hair, unkempt and unshorn; they hear how the bold herd fought the dragon, and won the princess and the kingdom, and their spirits are up and doing like him. Potatoes and milk, wooden noggins and good horn-spoons cease to exist; while the golden basin and the giant’s stores are spread before them by the eloquent voice and gesture of some grey wrinkled old man.

And when the story ends, and the fire burns low, and they coil themselves up to rest in their cribs lads and lasses dream on, and so they dream till they grow up, and grow old, and the old tale becomes a part of their quiet lives. The child’s dream of romance is the bright spot in a dull round of hardship and toil, and the man never forgets it while he lives.

John Francis Campbell, “On current British mythology and oral traditions”, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 1869-1870, vol. 2, pp. 331-332